Recent Posts: Influencer Relations

A first glance at the Analyst Value Survey shows new risks emerging for analyst relations professionals. We’re hosting a webinar on November 30 to hear how leading AR professionals are responding to them, and what the best practice is for your analyst relations program. Three risks stand out massively. First, there a big gap between the firms that vendors think […]

Five things stand out from vendors’ responses to a survey we conducted after our Analyst Relations roundtable at the English Speaking Union. Analysts (including analysts who call themselves consultants or advisors) are often thought to have bias, especially if most of their revenue comes from vendors. Sometimes the effort put into staying informed makes analysts seem very process-driven but less […]

Should someone you know be at the year’s most important discussion on analyst relations? We’ll be at the free ARchitect User Forum 2016 in San José, CA, on November 17. Professionals from industry leaders will introduce the sessions: Lopez Research, Digital transformation; IBM, AR in large organizations; Cognizant, Managing analyst events; Capgemini, AR knowledge management; Wipro, Intelligence-driven relationships; and ARinsights, AR […]

The Analyst Value Survey is open! Each year several hundred users of analyst research tell us which analyst firms they use, and which are most valuable. In exchange, they get access to our results webinar, where they discover which firms are delivering the most value in key market segments. You can take part too. Go to AnalystValueSurvey.com and click on […]

Looking for a new direction in your Analyst Relations career? October is a time when new opportunities pop up in the field. From IBM to Google, we gathered the top US Analyst Relations firms with vacancies needing to be filled. If you’d like to learn more about the opportunity and to schedule an interview, contact these firms directly. However, if […]

While it is illegal for analyst relations (AR) teams to wiretap the analysts, it is possible to eavesdrop on their conversations with enterprise IT managers and other technology and telecommunications buyers. Well, sort of.

The “Big Two” advisory firms have services, Forrester Client Advantage and Gartner Customer Insights, which are databases of the questions clients ask when scheduling a client inquiry. The insights available in these simple databases can be incredibly useful for vendors who invest the time and budget in data mining.

The information that can be extracted is of use to multiple constituencies within a vendor including AR (of course), market research, messaging, product management, sales and others. There are many more uses of the insights than there are audiences. For instance, for AR the questions illustrate the type of information that the analysts need… which might be different from what the AR team had been providing the to them. For Sales, the same questions might point out that prospects do not understand the vendor’s messages and that the talking points the sales representatives are using need to be modified.

There are limitations to the data. It includes questions only from clients of the firms, the questions are mostly those captured by client service staff scheduling the inquiry and don’t include other issues that arise during the call, and the answers are not included. However, even with these shortcomings, the databases are worth mining.

There is a caveat, and it’s a big one. These services are only worth the money if they are actually used. Too often the buyers become distracted by other tasks or lack of habit leads to the databases becoming “shelfware.”

SageCircle Technique:

Request a briefing by your Forrester and Gartner sales representatives about these services

Evaluate your current purchasing from the firms to see if there is planned spending that can be diverted to acquiring these services

Develop a plan for who will be the consumer of the information from these services and how the information will be used

Assign responsibility for who will analyze the data and create the reports that will be used by the research consumer

Periodically check that the reports are being generated and actually used

Bottom Line: Understanding the questions that advisory firm clients are asking analysts can provide valuable insights for many professionals in a vendor. However, the services are only worth the investment if the analysis will be used to change actions by the vendor.

Question: Have you considered using these services? How could the analyst firms make the data more useful to you to encourage your purchase?

2 Responses

Yes, we got offered these services a couple of years ago by HP – and they were very, very pricey indeed. One way to get added value is to insist on having a dedicated analyst assigned to the service – and them provide a precis or evaluation of the report, built into the price.

At the time we were looking specifically at hardware, and the insights would have been invaluable – as they were directly linked to customer issues – and it was going to be possible to categorise them to identify the most common, and knock off competitors accordingly.

Unfortunately, the direct value that this would have showed analyst relations providing sales, never got past the beancounters barriers. But for those who can get past them – I’d recommend it as a well worthwhile service.